Gov. Moonbeam comes back to Earth

Jerry Brown was born a few days before television began regular broadcasts, a few months before the first Superman comic book was released and about a year and a half before Hitler invaded Poland.

He became eligible for Social Security a few years ago — he is 72 — and, having become California’s youngest elected governor at age 36, he is on the verge of becoming its oldest elected governor.

Story Continued Below

In a year when political experience is derided, incumbency is an anchor around the neck and money means everything, Brown, a Democrat, has just opened a double-digit lead over billionaire businesswoman Meg Whitman, who has contributed a record-shattering $142 million to her own campaign and has outspent Brown 14-1.

Whitman has never served a day in office — not necessarily a drawback in our current national mood — while Brown has spent quite a few. A lifetime, in fact. Brown has served as Los Angeles Community College trustee (1969-71), California secretary of state (1971-75), governor of California (1975-83), chairman of the California Democratic Party (1989-91) and mayor of Oakland (1999-2007), and he is currently California’s attorney general. Like many successful politicians, he is not afraid to lose. He ran unsuccessfully for president of the United States in 1976, 1980 and 1992 and for the U.S. Senate in 1982.

I remember his first words to me. “We are all on Spaceship Earth,” he told me one warm June afternoon in 1976. I looked around. It appeared to me as if we were on a campaign bus in Southern California. “The dialectic process between co-equal branches takes unpredictable turns,” he went on. “This is all part of the discipline of the process. We cannot accept verbal cellophane for policy.”

Even by the standards of the time, Jerry Brown appeared to be one weird dude. (Chicago columnist Mike Royko dubbed him “Gov. Moonbeam,” a sobriquet that has stuck with Brown to this day, even though Royko later apologized.)

But Brown did not do all that badly in his first presidential run, winning five primaries and having enough credibility to run for president again four years later, where I caught up with him in New Hampshire. His pitch was simpler this time: Vote for Jerry Brown or die.

“The prospects are bleak. We are looking down the road to depression and world war. The chickens are coming home to roost. We are an island of affluence, sinking in a rising sea of despair,” he told about 75 Sears employees in the Mall of New Hampshire in Manchester one bone-chillingly cold winter day.

“Draft registration is just a way of getting kids to die to make oil companies richer,” he continued. “Nuclear power is grossly immoral. It can destroy our gene pool, irradiate our food chain, and the people making the decisions don’t care. Have you got your iodine for your thyroid cancer yet?”

That pretty much did it. The crowd began edging away. Down the street, Ronald Reagan was preaching the politics of joy, while Brown was talking about thyroid cancer.

Brown didn’t care. He stood there lean and hungry-looking (he was on the Pritikin diet) in his conservative gray suit, his digital watch still set on California time, lobbing these hand grenades into the crowd.